Thrusting Non-god In The Gaps And The Decadence of Science and Modern Culture

It would probably be the honest thing to do to come right out at front and say what I can see of Michael McCullough's professional work leads me to conclude I could honestly call it "science" only in the sense that science fiction is science.   In looking up the basis of his work, in his Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory, I found this statement:

Much of our work on forgiveness in the past few years has used a self-report measure called the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations (TRIM) Inventory. The version of the TRIM that is most widely in use right now is the TRIM-12. Here is a version of the TRIM-12 that includes scoring instructions, and technical and psychometric information.

 There is a link to the version  the TRIM Inventory that they are using, a series of set responses apparently asking about how the respondent imagines they would think and respond to an imaginary person who has done them wrong.  The procedure and items given as:

Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Scale--12-Item Form (TRIM-12)

For the following questions, please indicate your current thoughts and feelings about the person who hurt you. Use the following scale to indicate your agreement with each of the questions.

1= Strongly Disagree 2 = Disagree 3 = Neutral 4 = Agree 5 = Strongly Agree

1. I’ll make him/her pay.
 2. I keep as much distance between us as possible.
 3. I wish that something bad would happen to him/her.
 4. I live as if he/she doesn’t exist, isn’t around.
 5. I don’t trust him/her.
 6. I want him/her to get what he/she deserves.
 7. I find it difficult to act warmly toward him/her.
 8. I avoid him/her.
 9. I’m going to get even.
 10. I cut off the relationship with him/her.
 11. I want to see him/her hurt and miserable.
 12. I withdraw from him/her.

So, right off, it would seem to rely on question of  imagining responses to an imaginary person committing an imaginary offense and self-reporting on those. Everything about that relies, to start with, with a person being self-aware enough to accurately characterize their thoughts and actions in those imaginary situations.   It assumes an accurate response when there is no reason to make that assumption.  What that is supposed to reliably tell you about how the person would really respond to a real person doing something real only leads to more questions.  As the imagined person and the wrong they did is, apparently, undefined how anyone could honestly imagine how they would respond to it is the first of those.   Another is why would the researchers choose to pretend that there would be any consistency in the accuracy of one person's imagination of that over time or depending on something as transitory as their mood when they're answering the question.   Not to mention differences in the quality of the relationship of their self-reporting as related to reality among even any two people, not to mention even within some of the very small sample sizes that are considered totally acceptable for psychology.   I doubt they'd get consistent responses from one person asked to self-report to these items several times at intervals long enough for them to have forgotten how they answered the first time. 

I look at it and can think of so many problems with trying to answer any of them correctly on a yes/no basis that being asked to give them a five point ranking only makes things worse.  No abstract person has ever wronged me in an abstract way, like all human thinking and reactions, not to mention behavior, all of those things happen within an incredibly complex context in which things are of variable and constantly shifting character and importance to me.  Lots of things that would occupy way too much of my time in anger one week or month or decade would pass by with mild annoyance or wry amusement another time.   Not to mention the role of trying to be a better person by trying, trying, to control my anger as I sometimes manage, however imperfectly but not to any extent that I would feel comfortable assuming it in my response.   If you think that's thinking about it too hard, we are supposed to believe this "inventory" has something to do with real life.  If that is the result asserted, nothing short of that level of specificity would give anyone the right to make that assumption. 

But that is the assumption that we are constantly required to buy from psychology and all of the social sciences.  Such is the game of let's pretend that tells us what we're pretending is valid because, you know, behavior as science is hard.   Such is the "science" of psychology, to start with.   If you're basing what you do on stuff of that quality, there is no rational reason for anyone to think that the results are honest or reliable or even anything but absurd, when called "science".   Yet it is probably the most consistently pushed of all "science" in the mass media, the ranker speculations of cosmology a likely second place. 

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And if that were not bad enough, the current fad is to pretend that you can extend your reach into entirely unreported and unrecorded minds and lives of people and, in the worst of it, pre-human and even entirely non-human lives in the lost and unevidenced past.  Given the ridiculously inadequate tools of psychology to discern the minds and behaviors of living people, the assumption you can reliably make assertions about people in the past is nonsense.   There is no reason to believe that if you were able to survey people in the paleolithic, not to mention earlier epochs on an evolutionary time scale on how they imagined they would respond to such a survey that you'd get the same results.  And, even admitting that the results would likely be different, that would only mean that you are admitting that you don't know how they would differ.   In short, your best tools available to "do psychology with" will tell you absolutely nothing that would give you any reliable information about human minds in the past.  They wouldn't give you anything to base any HONEST assertions about that on.  

I think this kind of use of the word "evolution" is an unadmitted attempt to pretend that you can reliably fill in an enormous gap in knowledge within science with complete conjecture based on an extension of materialist ideology.   That was certainly how Michael McCullough was framing his assertions in the On Being program I posted about the other night.   

MS. TIPPETT: OK. And, Michael, I think that provides a cosmic context for the work you do, which is about the evolution of morality. I mean, I don't want to — I want to say this correctly. I mean, one of the — you, in your work, take an evolutionary perspective on moral emotions.

DR. MCCULLOUGH: Yeah, because the advances that biology has made has been through the notion that, to the extent that you see order in the living world — it is being driven by mechanism. I mean, it's an odd place. I think we end up in similar places ethically, but I actually see mechanism as our friend.

The statement is a faith statement, because you see order in the world, you assume all of the the world is driven by the same mechanism.   Leaving out that the assertions that the order in the world is due to a mechanical system is a metaphor, comparing the order in uninvented nature to a human made machine, the problem starts with an assumption that everything can be successfully compared to machines.   In the case of human behavior, or, in fact, any behavior, the idea that it is mechanical is presented with the problem that the "mechanism" unlike a humanly made machine will produce different results rather more often than any successful machine would.  If you are going to insist on a machine model, it's an incredibly complex machine that has so many parts and inputs of such variety and unpredictability that you would never be able to figure it out.

Computers are machines based on a humanly constructed metaphor of how very simple human thinking has been believed to be - a metaphor that is commonly and illogically asserted to tell us something about human minds when the relationship can only go in the other direction.  What I think we can really learn from that is the common habit of people in our culture to fail to see what we're doing when we do that.  It is a habit of thought ingrained in our culture from the beginning of our making machines as uncomplicated as a clock - which began as a metaphor for the perceived motion of the sun over us, one that didn't even reveal the actual relationship of the two objects used to make the metaphor.  And human minds are nowhere near as observable as those things we create by making these metaphors, thus such things as the "inventory" in lieu of actually being able to make anything like an objective observation of the mind.   And they are no where near as simple as the movement of the Earth and the Sun.  Or as regular.

I think our culture, our respect for the achievements of science and technology in areas where they do, actually, give us something to rely on bleeds over into areas where they can't do that.   We replace a materialistic system of superstition for that ability, one based on the assumption expressed by Michael McCullough. We assert things about human minds, the unrecorded and unobservable past in evolutionary history, even the existence of jillions of universes based on those habits and the ideology that is behind them.   

One of the frequently made, totally irrelevant and totally clueless assertions commonly made by sci-rangers on the blog is that you are trying to put "God in the gaps" of knowledge.  You will be accused of that even when you're not talking about God but are merely pointing out that there are gaps where they are pretending there are not.   What they are doing is putting their preferred substitute for God in those gaps, a simulation of science and assertions of materialist faith that because of non-speculative physics and chemistry giving us good things, we can make up stories and fables and fantastic worlds and universes and pretend that we can read the minds of our most remote ancestors.   And, given someone with a degree from a university and a sufficiently strong service to the controlling materialist ideology, gets to call that "science" and we are required to pretend we don't see a problem with it. 

The word "evolution" is fraught with the entire scope of meaning of that word, scientific, political, ideological, and the subject of so much combat on two sides of a culture war that it has become a symbol of ultimate evil on one side and as a Holy Grail or a sacred talisman on the other side.  It is so powerful within the side that likes to claim science as its property, its god, that merely attaching the word to some really, really bad science is powerful enough to suspend any rigorous consideration of the thing it protects.   I originally noticed that use of the word to name "evolutionary psychology" which, from my reading of Wilson and Dawkins in the 1970s, I thought was an attempt to insert the appallingly bad standards allowed in the social sciences into actual biological science.  An insertion that is one of the most successfully adopted bad ideas I've seen in my lifetime.  Matched only by allowing a similar invasion into liberal politics, based largely on a similar religio-ideological view of science.   It has been a total disaster for liberalism, hollowing it out from the foundation, the results for science won't likely be any better.   All of which could have been avoided by only allowing actual, rigorous science studying the real phenomenon of evolution to use the name in scientific publications and classrooms.   That was not done even in the founding generation of scientists in the modern period of biology, beginning in the 1860s, who began making ideological use of it almost immediately and began the practice of creating a simulation of data and even life forms out of an extension of natural selection, not observation.   So was one of the great advances in science immediately turned into something that would damage it by the very scientists who pretended they didn't do things like that. 

We are living in a neo-scholastic period of science and culture, one that has few of the virtues of medieval scholasticism and all of its vices.  Only, we tell ourselves, that we are enlightened by the torch of science and so are not capable of doing exactly what it is we do and call it "science".   As I've pointed out, the materialist god, atheist saint Bertrand Russell predicted something like that about ninety years ago.  It's one thing he got right even as he did so much to promote the conditions that would bring it about.  And he clearly knew better than to do that.